Independence (42 page)

Though it is more apparent in hindsight than it was to contemporaries, Congress's response to Wilson's address on February 13, 1776, was a pivotal moment. The reconciliationists were finished. They had dominated Congress and constrained its actions from the beginning. No more. The war now controlled Congress, and a majority of delegates were prepared to do whatever had to be done to gain victory. With one event bringing on another, as Samuel Adams had remarked, the likelihood was considerable that wartime exigencies—as Wilson and Dickinson surely must have known—were moving Congress steadily, and rapidly, toward an irrevocable breach.

Forty-eight hours after Congress rebuffed Wilson and Dickinson, Robert Morris, a member of the Pennsylvania delegation who had been an unbending advocate for reconciliation, wrote a friend that it was inevitable that Congress would declare American independence, most likely sometime during 1776. In jumbled syntax, he allowed that war had “prepared Men's minds for an Independency, that were shock'd at the idea a few weeks ago.” He also predicted that if Great Britain failed to crush the rebellion in 1776, it “may bid adieu to the American Colonies.”
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Morris was adapting like a chameleon. He was a congressman cut from different cloth, a man from a mercantile background who in large measure viewed the war and America's break with the mother country from the perspective of its impact on countinghouse ledger books. That was not necessarily good news for those who favored reconciliation.

The forty-four-year-old Morris sported a middle-age spread, a thick mane of graying hair, and dark, furtive eyes. He was pallid, as might be expected of a man who spent his days indoors at a desk. His demeanor was that of a man obsessed with profits and losses. He tended toward briskness and formality. He was not unfriendly, but he was neither warm nor outgoing. He had few close friends, and no one who worked with him in business or public affairs ever characterized him as engaging or recalled any spark of humor or kindness on his part.

Born in Liverpool in 1735, Morris had emigrated to America with his father just as he entered adolescence. They settled in Maryland, where his father worked as a tobacco agent, but after only a year in the colonies young Morris was orphaned following his father's death. The youngster's guardian sent him to Philadelphia to begin an apprenticeship in the mercantile firm of Charles Willing. Morris and Willing's son, Thomas, separated in age by less than two years, developed a close relationship and in 1757—following the elder Willing's demise in a yellow fever epidemic—established their own firm, Willing, Morris and Company.

As was true of the Franklin and Galloway political partnership, Willing and Morris brought dissimilar but essential talents to their business partnership. Willing had ties to powerful Philadelphia families. His mother was a Shippen, a family that had long produced professional and civic leaders, including Philadelphia's first mayor; his father was one of the city's more influential merchants and had also held the post of Philadelphia's mayor. Young Willing was well educated, having attended preparatory schools in the mother country and read law at the Inns of Court in London. He was amiable, cosmopolitan, well connected, and quite affluent, if not wealthy. He was also politically active and deeply involved in the life of the city. Willing dabbled in Indian diplomacy, sat in the assembly between 1764 and 1767, and, like his father, served as mayor of Philadelphia. He was additionally a trustee for a charitable school, director of the College of Philadelphia, and judge of the Orphans' Court.
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Robert Morris by Charles Willson Peale. A Philadelphia merchant, Morris entered Congress in 1775. He favored reconciliation and refused to vote for independence, but in August 1776 Morris signed the Declaration of Independence. (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art/ The Bridgeman Art Library)

Yet it was Morris who set his and Willing's company apart from its rivals. Fortuity had brought him into a field of endeavor for which he was perfectly suited. Meticulous, industrious, and persevering, Morris seemed to have the Midas touch when it came to commerce. He landed government contracts for the nascent firm during the French and Indian War, turning that conflict into a bonanza for Willing, Morris and Company. The company continued to flourish during the dozen years before the Revolutionary War broke out, in part because Willing and Morris had an easy collaborative relationship. Early on Willing told his partner that “my house shall be your home and myself your friend.” After two decades in business together, Willing told Morris of his “esteem and friendship” for him, adding that his partner remained “the Man in the World I love most, and for whom I have every feeling of affection and regard.”
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By 1775 Willing, Morris and Company sent out some twenty ships annually, exporting grain from the Pennsylvania heartland (and from the Chesapeake and even Quebec) and importing wine, salt, and lemons from Portugal and Spain. But the heart of the company's trade was with Great Britain and the West Indies. The company shipped corn, wheat, and flaxseed to Ireland and lumber, flour, and fish to the Caribbean, and its vessels returned home laden with manufactured goods, luxury items, and casks of rum. In the last years before the war, the company branched into land speculation schemes, investing in what the proprietors thought would be a citrus-producing tract near the Mississippi River. Before he turned thirty-five, Morris, with his wife (the daughter of a prominent lawyer) and two sons, lived in a stone mansion on an eighty-acre estate that sprawled along the Schuylkill River only three miles from downtown Philadelphia.
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Both Willing and Morris supported the nonimportation boycotts against the Stamp Act and Townshend Duties, and each shared the outlook of Dickinson with regard to opposing London's policies. Willing was the more politically active of the two—he was a member of the provincial convention in 1774 that compelled Galloway to have the assembly consent to the First Continental Congress—and he was elected to the Second Congress in May 1775. Morris remained largely aloof from politics until war broke out, but in the first election thereafter he ran successfully for the assembly. He had hardly taken his seat before the legislature added him to the colony's delegation in Congress in November 1775. Both Willing and Morris were unswerving advocates of reconciliation, but the two were businessmen who never lost sight of what their public service could do for Willing, Morris and Company's earnings. They knew that war could be both good and bad for business. “[W]e judge that Business must be very valuable, so long as the other Colonies are shut up” by the Royal Navy, they said. Obtaining a sizable chunk of that business often appeared to be their guiding light.
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In September 1775 Willing was among the initial batch of delegates chosen to serve on the Secret Committee, Congress's panel for making sub rosa arms purchases. However, hard on the heels of Morris's election to Congress six weeks later, Willing resigned from the committee, and Morris—who not only had a proven track record in landing government contracts but also had been privately trading for munitions in the West Indies since the outbreak of the war—took his place. In no time, Willing, Morris and Company obtained several contracts from Congress for trafficking in gunpowder, gunlocks, arms, artillery, and bayonets. It also had a share of the nearly three hundred thousand dollars that Congress appropriated for opening trade in Europe and a guarantee of 5 percent of the profits turned by that commerce. Morris developed cozy ties with the army's paymaster in Virginia, who channeled business to Willing, Morris and Company in return for government contracts that the congressman secured for him. Morris saw no ethical conflicts in his actions. “[I]t seems to me,” he said in 1776, that “the present opportunity of Improving our Fortunes ought not to be lost especially as the very means of doing it will Contribute to the Service of our Country at the same time.” By mid-February 1776, when Morris came to think that a congressional declaration of independence was a certainty, he was working hard to land a contract to export tobacco from the Chesapeake colonies to France, commerce that long had been illegal under Great Britain's trade laws. Morris badly wanted a share of that trade.
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Morris appeared to be playing every angle. Early in 1776, he let business contacts in England know that he believed “the Power of Great Britain [was] insurmountable” and that he favored reconciliation. But what Morris really believed was that the war would not go on long before nearly every nation in Europe would “be glad to treat and trade with us on our own terms.” He wanted a role in that traffic, for as commerce with Great Britain dried up in the course of the war, the European trade would be his company's salvation. Morris had another reason for wanting to get involved in trade with Europe. He thought the most likely outcome of the war would be a stalemate. Great Britain would be unable to crush the rebellion; the colonists would lack the ability to gain victory; a stalemated war would end in a negotiated peace. Morris appeared to believe that after all was said and done, the America colonies would remain part of the British Empire, but London would have to grant greater autonomy to the colonies, including more liberal trading rights outside the empire.
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Morris presumed that the European trade connections he forged during the war would serve him well following hostilities.

Robert Morris and Thomas Willing were still part of the anti-independence bloc in Congress. Each had lived in England, loved England, and was loyal to old country ties. Willing, Morris and Company had innumerable commercial contacts throughout the British Empire and had prospered within the Anglo-American union. As Morris observed just before Christmas 1775: “I abhor the Name & Idea of a Rebel. I neither want or wish a Change of King or Constitution.”
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But both men—Morris especially—were opportunists, and Morris in particular knew that a declaration of American independence was on the horizon. The colonists, he said, “have been drove into it step by step with a reluctance on their part that has been manifested in all their proceedings.”
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He also believed that American independence might serve his interests. If Willing and Morris were typical of the powerful Philadelphia merchants, and of merchants throughout America's cities, they were a weak reed for Dickinson to depend on in his continued fight against American independence.

“Where the plague are these [peace] Commissioners,” Morris exclaimed as spring dawned in Philadelphia. Nearly one hundred days had passed since the colonists learned of the king's address, with its vague reference to commissioners, and not a single envoy had been seen. Morris, who had been willing to make peace on the terms worked out with Lord Drummond, prayed for the arrival of a commission empowered to offer “terms fit for Freeman.” If and when the commissioners arrived, he added, they must be willing to negotiate with Congress. Should that not be the case, he said, “they may as well stay where they are.”
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When Morris offered his thoughts in April, the peace commissioners alluded to by the king in October had not been formally appointed. The long delay in dispatching the commissioners was not due to the novelty of the idea. The notion of sending an envoy to America to negotiate a settlement went back at least to early 1774, when Dartmouth, in the course of the debate over how to respond to the Boston Tea Party, had proposed that the ministry send an emissary to the colonies. A year later, during the cabinet's final peacetime discussions on using force, Dartmouth had again pressed for sending a representative across the sea armed with authority to conduct talks with the colonists. A mission of the sort had been politically untenable for North prior to the outbreak of hostilities, and the prime minister—and, above all, the monarch—also thought it ill-conceived. North had remained convinced that when confronted with the prospect of British force, the colonists would come to their senses, throw out the firebrands and demagogues who had come into power since the Stamp Act crisis, and accept London's terms leading to reconciliation.

But as news of the bloody disasters suffered by the British army along Battle Road and on Bunker Hill poured into London in the summer of 1775, North quietly grew to think that a negotiated settlement offered Great Britain the best possible way out of its American dilemma. While North was unbending on the issue of parliamentary sovereignty, he privately considered almost everything else to be fair game for negotiations, though he was too adept politically to say so openly.

North's first challenge was to secure authorization for a peace commissioner. As was customary, the prime minister had a hand in writing the king's address that opened Parliament in October 1775, and it was North who inserted in the rough draft the puzzling sentence about “persons … so commissioned” to restore the rebellious colonies to the empire. For North, the passage meant that a commissioner would be sent to America to negotiate with the rebels. It is not clear what George III believed he was consenting to, but once the king agreed to the insertion of the passage, North set about naming a commissioner. Dartmouth, in one of his final acts as American secretary, offered Lord Howe the post of peace commissioner. He did so, of course, with North's approval.
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